TY - JOUR VL - 15 PB - Springer Science and Business Media LLC Y1 - 2024/05/07/ A1 - Trauth, Martin H A1 - Asrat, Asfawossen A1 - Fischer, Markus L A1 - Hopcroft, Peter O A1 - Foerster, Verena A1 - Kaboth-Bahr, Stefanie A1 - Kindermann, Karin A1 - Lamb, Henry F A1 - Marwan, Norbert A1 - Maslin, Mark A A1 - Schaebitz, Frank A1 - Valdes, Paul J N2 - The transition from a humid green Sahara to today?s hyperarid conditions in northern Africa ~5.5 thousand years ago shows the dramatic environmental change to which human societies were exposed and had to adapt to. In this work, we show that in the 620,000-year environmental record from the Chew Bahir basin in the southern Ethiopian Rift, with its decadal resolution, this one thousand year long transition is particularly well documented, along with 20?80 year long droughts, recurring every ~160 years, as possible early warnings. Together with events of extreme wetness at the end of the transition, these droughts form a pronounced climate ?flickering?, which can be simulated in climate models and is also present in earlier climate transitions in the Chew Bahir environmental record, indicating that transitions with flickering are characteristic of this region. AV - public JF - Nature Communications SN - 2041-1723 N1 - This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ID - discovery10192334 TI - Early warning signals of the termination of the African Humid Period(s) UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47921-1 ER -